Owl Eyes
by Zenthisoror
Summary: They called him Owl Eyes because his eyes missed nothing. He looked into the dark that bled from people's hearts with the same hunters' focus, the same apparent clarity, as an owl in the night. (Prehistoric man AU)
**Disclaimer: The characters are the property of the Death Note franchise.**

 **Author's Note: I have had such trouble uploading or using anything on fanfic lately. Hello, there! Nice to meet you if we haven't met already. Zen here and I'm still stress-relieving with strange Death Note one-shots. This one came about after reading up on Otzi the Iceman in Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, an optimistic account and analysis of man's history of violence. ;) Fun book!**

 **Without further ado, hope you enjoy! Best, Zen :D**

 **Edit: Fanfic isn't letting me scroll to the end of the document, so I'll have to thank in you advance for reading here. Thank you.**

* * *

They called him Owl Eyes because his eyes missed nothing. He looked into the dark that bled from people's hearts with the same hunters' focus, the same apparent clarity, as an owl in the night.

Like the owl, it was not by choice. The dark in people was a world Owl Eyes simply saw and understood. He knew its lowliest depths and cruellest reaches. He was its greatest expert and most renowned tracker of its wilderness.

When winter came round and the nights grew long and people looked too closely at the shadows at the edges of their fires, the clans called on him to look into their darkness and find and catch their newest demons.

This winter was no exception. There was a new monster, a monster without a face or name, and having no face or name of its own, it was said that it had come amongst the clans to kill and steal them from the people.

Such was the story in the lower mountain clans and a messenger was sent for Owl Eyes, but Owl Eyes had already been on his way.

He would uncover its tracks, he would hunt it down, and he would look into the dark that the others didn't dare and show to the clans what he knew as a basic instinct in his bones: That this monster was no different from any other monster, called up from the endless well of monsters that dwelled in man already.

Men were sufficiently monstrous without imagined ones crowding the dark as well. This monster, Owl Eyes would prove, was a man.

* * *

Perhaps it was the turn of the earth, a certain alignment of the stars, perhaps it was his famously perceptive eyes, or perhaps it was simply his hunter's instinct. Long years staring into the dark made Owl Eyes part of it in some way and he had found that he could unsettle it, simply by looking.

He found his monster far sooner than he had dared hope possible.

There was a young man who could remember the names and faces of people from a summer clansmeet of three years previous and their attendance since.

His name was Light. Owl Eyes later thought that Glacier, Icicle, Eel Slime or something equally slippery and treacherous would have been more fitting, but no mother could have predicted the man her son would become, which was perhaps a kindness to all mothers.

Light was a tracker, as his father was. He was tenacious, talented and bright in a way that made Owl Eyes want to look away until a creeping suspicion flickered its tongue at the back of his mind that that was exactly what Light wanted - and that Owl Eyes, Light's own family and Light's clan were being blinded.

He was intelligent, gifted and nobody dared to look at him closely, and the hunter's instinct beating out the rhythm of Owl Eyes' thoughts said that this was the lair of the beast - that it was in this boy that the nameless monster hid.

It had surprised Owl Eyes to learn that the clan's most promising young tracker had been named for the light of the secretive moon and not the pompously righteous rays of the sun as he found he had assumed, and he mused that perhaps there had been some foresight in Light' s mother's naming of him.

The moon was two-faced, after all. It had a face it hid in the dark as well as the one it shone upon the earth, and it had many smiles.

Light was quick to realise what prey it was that Owl Eyes had truly come after and one night he came and took a seat at Owl Eyes' fire.

He too, Light said, had an interest in the nameless monster. He too believed it to be the work of man, not demon. Perhaps they could hunt it together?

He was young and he was bright and he was loved by his clan. Light had never tracked a monster of man before and was eager to learn, especially from the best, and to all this the clan nodded, approved, and said this would be good.

When Owl Eyes looked up he saw the monster pacing closer.

It bared its teeth behind Light's smile.

"Yes," he said to the monster only his eyes could see, "let us hunt it together."

* * *

They made a good hunting pair. Light favoured the bow and bring down kills from a distance. Owl Eyes preferred traps and to have his prey still kicking in his grip. Where Light sometimes looked hungrily up to the heavens as though to claw it down to earth, Owl Eyes turned his gaze to the tracks at their feet, the traces of all the small animals scrabbling in the dirt. They made a code of hand signals so that they could hunt in silence, and whilst the nameless monster slept it was between Owl Eyes and Light alone. The other clan trackers could no more follow it than they could track Owl Eyes through a forest when he made a game of letting them try.

There was one rare time when Light's shot missed and hit the buck in its shoulder.

 _Once more_ , Owl Eyes gestured, raising his hand over the rock he was hiding behind.

 _Yes_ , came the returned sign through the treecover, although Owl Eyes knew that it was more likely to mean, _I don't need you to tell me that_.

The second time, Light did not miss.

* * *

At one village there was a Winter Queen.

She was chosen on the day of the first frost and after she was chosen the lore said that her feet were not to touch the ground until the first buds of spring, otherwise the cold would seep into the earth and spring would not be reborn.

Misa's hair was coloured with sap and chalk. She was wrapped in furs and skins. Her feet were bound in white rabbitskin boots and her temples were wreathed in mistletoe. Pine and ivy were tucked behind her ears, and there was amber at her throat with a honey-coloured glow.

"You say you've come here chasing the nameless monster." She shifted in her pile of furs and Owl Eyes reflected that under all the clay and crowns the Winter Queen was a young woman who could barely sit still. "If the nameless monster has come here then I am glad for it! It is welcome here and I, the Winter Queen, will give it shelter and dote upon with all my heart."

"Why?"

"Because it kills all those that stray from their village. Because it is cold and dark but not cruel for all its coldness." She smiled with soot-stained teeth. "The nameless monster is Winter's Prince and I would love him and between us we will make winter kind for all who deserve it."

* * *

It was a black knife.

That was the form the nameless monster took when they finally stormed the village to which all of its freshest tracks led.

It was a shard of obsidian with a carved bone grip, and when Owl Eyes took up its hilt a numbing cold seeped up his arm like a spike of poison, for that was what it surely was.

And there standing over them in the trappers' hidehouse was a tall, stooped monster, its head lost in the shadows, its claws hanging at its knees, its eyes burning yellow through the smoke and it looked down upon Owl Eyes with a face contemptuous as the grey seas.

Let me see it, said Light, and Owl Eyes let him take it, the strange black knife.

It sat in Light's hand as if the bone hilt knew him well, and Owl Eyes was _content_ because he was not wrong, for the monster he had been looking for had awoken, and compared to the nameless monster - the tall, gaunt monster with its frostbitten lips, claiming the black knife as her own - was no more terrifying than another night-time animal; and Owl Eyes was _lost_ because with the black knife in Light's hands, he looked into a darkness and, for the first time, for all his renowned powers of vision, of foresight, he could see nothing ahead of him.

* * *

The raid had gone well. Owl Eyes had the knife and the monster. The pack of trappers who had sheltered his nameless monster in their hearts had been sent on ahead to reach the clan before nightfall, and Owl Eyes and Light would follow later after a short meal.

They set off after midday. Their path followed the glistening course of the glacier. There was snow in Owl Eyes' bear-skin cap and falling lightly on his shoulders. He curled his toes in the grass stuffed into his snow-shoes and walked on up the side of the glacier, the wind glancing off the ice with a rasping hiss. The bone-monster that followed wherever a human took its knife circled them like a buzzard, its white shape lost against the clouds.

He was aware that Light had stopped some distance behind him. The black knife in its salmon-skin sheath chilled him through the skin of his backpack. He knew what Light needed the distance for and Owl Eyes let him have it. The path along the glacier road was treacherous. This was the moment beyond which there was no return.

 _(But Owl Eyes saw nothing ahead of them anyway)_

The arrow slammed into his shoulder with a creak of the shaft and a crack of bone, and he cried out, heard footsteps slipping on the snowy path as they rushed up behind him, turned just in time to catch hold of Light's wrists as the nameless monster, burning wide awake and vengeful in those eyes, snatched for his backpack.

They grappled on the glacier path. Light trapped Owl Eyes' arms to his sides before he could reach for the copper axe in his pack, stole the fletched arrows from his quiver and stamped them into splinters under his feet. The arrowhead buried in Owl Eyes' shoulder burned and he was wondering if it had been poison-painted when his pack was tugged free from his back and, with a wild-eyed, panicked shove delivered to his chest, Owl Eyes was falling.

His head cracked against the glacier, burst instantly with a slick warmth, and he tumbled, slipped, skidded, until he dropped once more and came to a stop in a cold, dark crevasse of grey ice, Light out of sight.

Blood seeped from the back of his head into the folds of his cap. He lay where he fell in the crevasse. Stared up at the long white clouds.

The arrowhead throbbed in his shoulder, drawing blood as it bit deeper to the bone.

All was quiet upon the glacier. He could hear his own breaths, too loud in Owl Eyes' ears. What was he thinking? He would never catch anything if he made this much noise on a hunt. His blood was ringing in his ears with an echoing beat like drums. Surely somebody must be able to hear it? Where was the old clan elder who had raised Owl Eyes as his own? Where were the boys who had followed his footsteps on hunts and tried to learn his tricks?

Where was Light? Where was his treacherous hunting partner who had taken up the black knife?

With every beat he could feel his limbs growing heavier and colder, and the pain in his shoulder, at the back of his head, burned and stung.

He saw that day again, that rare occasion that Light had missed, felt the pale sun that was still brighter than it was now upon his face, smelled the brittle moss on the rock he had been crouched behind, saw the meal they had shared when the meat had been prepared and the fireside by which they had sat defiant against the night, and the arrowhead in his shoulder seemed to melt away.

He raised his hand and crooked his fingers.

 _Once more._

* * *

In the end, it was the bone monster, whispering the name Owl Eye's birth mother had given him to its knife. Not even Owl Eyes had known it.

Light packed the axe, the dagger, the firestarting kit that he had thrown out in his hurry to get at the black knife, back into Owl Eyes' pack and dropped it into the glacial crevasse to rest alongside its owner.

In the cold of the ice and snow, the man's fingers had curled into a shape reminiscent of their hunting code.

He watched the snow settle soundlessly upon that wide-eyed face, those eyes that saw too much, then walked away with the knife in hand and the bone monster followed.

* * *

 _2002_

* * *

The 'Iceman' exhibition at National Science Museum had a three hour long queue, grossly overpriced tickets, and so many children crammed into the rooms that Light thought it something of a minor miracle when he finally manoeuvred Sayu up to a prime spot by the glass.

She raised her camera and took a picture, then breezed off to the next glass case, within which was a leather bag with all of the Iceman's possessions were laid out on display.

Light sighed. She had been raving about seeing this exhibition for weeks and now that Sayu was here she had barely spared two minutes for the main attraction. Determined to at least get his money's worth, Light stepped up to the glass and peered into the case.

Inside was the body of a man. The mummy was, the placards told him, over five thousand years old. Its skin had been tanned to a bright red glossy leather over the millennia. Its head was a shiny hairless dome. The sockets of his eyes were sunken and its nose was a molten, triangular cavity where the years had torn it away, along with half of his upper lip.

It had been found in a puddle of glacial meltwater, its torso and legs still frozen in the ice, and was subsequently dug out from the glacier by a team of very determined archaeologists armed with drills and axes.

They had analysed the contents of its stomach and guts, found that it had eaten a last meal of ibex meat and herb bred, and infected with whipworm. It had cavities and had likely eaten too much carbohydrates.

The 'Iceman' was mankind's earliest known example of a possible victim of murder.

Researchers thought that it was the head wound at the back of the skull – of which there were many photographs, arranged neatly about the Iceman's body – which had killed him, possibly from being pushed into the crevasse during the struggle. They had found bruises on his hands, wrists and chests, and an arrowhead in his shoulder.

Before Light could stop to think what he was doing, he was reaching out and tracing the plastic model of the flint arrowhead set beside the explanatory placard, and a distant part of him grumbled that it was blunter and rounder than he had ever knapped, and he felt so utterly _insulted_ –

 _Eyes that saw what others didn't, shut at last beneath falling snow -_

He drew back his hand with a start, but the chill like a breath against the back of his neck was gone as quickly as it had come. He forgot it an instant.

He returned his gaze to the Iceman, skinny and five thousand years dead, one hand curled up against his chest, the other raised with its fingers crooked.

Half out of amusement, half out of a curious feeling of familiarity that Light couldn't place but decided must have been from seeing the Iceman on one of so many TV specials commemorating the exhibition, he mimicked the crooked finger shape of the raised hand behind the glass.

A thought whispered to him like a memory.

 _Once more._

 _\- a leather snow shoe crunching on ice, a bowstring scraping down his finger, cold air that smelled of blood and pine sap, and a great grey glacier with a dim blue half-light glow -_

"Light! Hurry up! I want to see the mammoths in the next room!"

Light lowered his hand.

He looked up to see Sayu waving at him from beside a display on forensic archaeology and waved in reply.

When he looked back at the Iceman, he was strangely surprised to find that it looked so empty. It was reddened skin stretched over blackened bones, an ancient fool who turned his back on an enemy and let himself get shot, a cold case unearthed as though for some grand cosmic joke.

For a moment, he felt an inexplicable heaviness upon his shoulders, as though a hand was hovering over him, ready to move him into place, and he closed his eyes, tried to pursue it before it faded -

"Light, come on!"

The feeling slipped away like snow from a branch at the start of spring.

Light opened his eyes and the mummy gazed back.

"I'm on my way."


End file.
